new neo-Victorian Studies issue on-line

[Lisa Hager]

Featuring an article on steampunk by regular Steam Scholars participant Christine Ferguson!

Lisa


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kohlke M.L. <M.L.K...@swansea.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 3:41 AM
Subject: new neo-Victorian Studies issue on-line
To: VICT...@listserv.indiana.edu


Dear VICTORIA List,



We're pleased to announce the publication of Neo-Victorian Studies 4:2 (2011), a special issue on 'Spectacles and Things: Visual and Material Culture and/in Neo-Victorianism', guest-edited by Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss. For contents, please see below.



Best wishes,
Mel Kohlke and Liz Ho



Editors, Neo-Victorian Studies

neovictor...@swansea.ac.uk

m.l.k...@swansea.ac.uk

e...@ursinus.edu





NVS 4:2 (2011)



Introduction: Spectacles and Things - Visual and Material Culture and/in Neo-Victorianism

Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss



"Those Ill Things": On Hidden Spectacles and the Ethics of Display

Monika Pietrzak-Franger



Visualising Victoria: Gender, Genre and History in The Young Victoria (2009)

Julia Kinzler



Surface Tensions: Steampunk, Subculture, and the Ideology of Style

Christine Ferguson



Wagnerpunk: A Steampunk Reading of Patrice Chéreau's Staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876)

Carmel Raz



Neo-Victorian Things: Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White

Gianmarco Perticaroli



Unending Dickens: Droodian Absences

Joachim Frenk



"That's the Effect of Living Backwards": Patterns of Technological Change, Lewis Carroll's Alice Books, and Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

Kara M. Manning



Also included are review essays on Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan & Wayne Wang's film adaptation (by Elizabeth Ho) and on Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie and Gary Inbinder's The Flower to the Painter (by Marie-Luise Kohlke)

--

University of Wisconsin - Waukesha
1500 North University Dr.
Waukesha, WI 53188-2720
Office: 129 Westview
lisa....@uwc.edu || http://www.lisahager.net/
Twitter: lmhager

[Amy Montz]

Hi everyone,

Wanted to share this CFP for a collection on YA Dystopian Fiction, as several new YA are steampunk or clockpunk in nature.  Also, please forward to any interested colleagues.

Thanks!
Amy

Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction

In the last decade, stories of dystopian societies have become increasingly prevalent in young adult fiction, and almost all question young people’s places within such societies.  Works such as Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Lauren Oliver’s Delirium, Ally Condi’s Matched, Veronica Roth’s Divergent, and Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone are particularly concerned with how their adolescent female protagonists’ navigation of social mores and structures give them virtually no control over the outcome of their lives.  For example, in The Hunger Games Trilogy, Katniss Everdeen has learned from growing up in Panem, a country that willingly sacrifices its children to maintain control of their parents, that masking emotion is key to survival. Other protagonists, such as Matched’s Cassia and Delirium’s Lena, directly confront experiences of love and desire in societies that have eradicated such feelings.

While these female protagonists challenge the audience’s preconceptions of what it means to be a young woman--someone who is preoccupied with consumer culture, dating dilemmas, and high school cliques--the use of the dystopian genre raises the stakes of adolescent struggles regarding identity, agency, and community. These authors specifically place female protagonists in settings where they must rebel against society to take any control over their own lives and to improve the societies in which they live.  Thus, through the realm of dystopian fiction, these authors argue that rebellion against authority allows young women to defy both social and gender expectations in order to become active agents in their own lives, rather than being passive recipients of social mores.

This proposed anthology seeks papers that consider how female protagonists are represented in contemporary young adult dystopian fiction.  How are the authors of young adult dystopian fiction consciously (or unconsciously) reinforcing or challenging stereotypical characterizations of female protagonists?  

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• young women as rebels, leaders, or instigators
• young women as the head of the family
• war and its impact on young women
• young women who reject/question socially-constructed feminine virtues
• young women who challenge what it means to be a young women in their individual societies
• role of environment and circumstance in YA dystopian fiction
• claiming female agency in a dystopian society
• female protagonists in YA dystopians compared to female protagonists in more conventional YA novels (i.e., Gossip Girl, The It Girl, or Uglies)
• adolescent female rebellion in YA fiction

We are currently seeking a book contract for this anthology.  Please submit a 500-word abstract and a brief CV by May 1, 2012 to: Sara K. Day, Miranda Green-Barteet, and Amy L. Montz at yadystopi...@gmail.com.